Song of a Comet

Pale plummet of the stark immensities, From perished heavens cast, I fall and flare Through gulfs by stellar orbits girdled round; And spaces bare Of sparkless night between the galaxies— By path of sun nor circling planet bound. No star allots my lone and cyclic gyre; I mark the systems vanish one by one; Among the swarming worlds I lunge, And sudden plunge Close to the zones of solar fire; Or ' mid the mighty wrack of stars undone, Flash, and with momentary rays Compel the dark to yield Their aimless forms, whose once far-potent blaze In ashes chill is now inurned. Upon the shadowy heavens half-revealed, I show their planets turned, Whose strange ephemerae, On adamantine tablets deeply written, In cities long unlitten, Have left their history And lore beyond redemption or surmise. Adown contiguous skies, I pass the thickening brume Of systems yet unshaped, that hang immense Along mysterious shores of gloom; Or see—unimplicated in their doom— The final and disastrous gyre Of blinded suns that meet, And from their mingled heat And battle-clouds intense, Overspread the deep with fire.

Upon the Lion's track, Or far beyond the abysms of the Lyre, I thread, through mazes of the zodiac, Mine orbit placed amid The multiple and irised stars, or hid, Unsolved and intricate, In many a planet-swinging sun's estate. At times I steal in solitary flight Along the rim of the exterior night That rounds the universe; And then return, Past outer footholds of sidereal light, To see the systems gather and disperse; And learn What vast and multifarious marvels wait In the dim void that has no ultimate; What wraiths of suns extinguished long ago On alien welkins burn; What flaming blossoms grow From the black battlefields of cosmic wars; What stellar hells, or ampler spheres sublime, Enisled in diverse time, Are wrought from sharded moons and meteors; And haply I discern What paler fires, to mine own self akin, Still haunt the night's eternal corridors, Or in the toils of great Arcturus spin. Then, restless still, I rise Through vaults of mightier gloom, to watch the dark Snatch at the flame of failing suns; Or mark That midden of the stagnant nadir skies Where many a fated orbit runs. An arrow sped from some forgotten bow, Through change of firmaments and systems sent, And finding bourn nor bars, I fly, nor know For what remoter mark my flight is meant.